The second thing you need to be aware of is how wb browsers handle links that appear in a web page, and in particular how they handle relative links. Relative links are most easily thought of as links in a web page that do not specify the domain of the link. So for example, on this blog, the domain is ouseful.wordpress.com. Links to posts on OUseful.info look something like the following:

One further thing to know about relative links is that in you use something of the form ?foo=bar in the link (e.g. <a href=”?foo=bar”>), the browser will add the argument to the end of the current page’s URL. So if the page mypage.html being served from http://example.com contains the relative link <a href=”?foo=bar”> that link will actually point to http://example.com/mypage.html?foo=bar.

Putting these two things together (how to create a URI for the single item RSS feed version of a post, and how to construct relative URIs), we are now in a position to add an ‘RSS version of this page’ link to a WordPress blog sidebar.

So, to get the single item RSS feed link, go to the Widgets settings area of your WordPress blog and add a text widget as follows:

“In fairness to Blogger, it does offer some additional parameters that let you go back and grab additional posts – I think it was as many as the last 500. ”

So if that applies to category feeds, or the blog has less than 500 items, you can probably finesse a single RSS item feed by grabbing the whole feed and then filtering on the title e.g. within a Yahoo pipe. That’s a recipe I’ve used before now!

Thank you so much for this tutorial Tony…
I was starting building my own plugin to do that when i found your solution. You saved me a lot of time, but i was just wondering, is it possible to use that with a custom feed template ?
I see that i can do that with the Atom and RSS2, but for example the RDF doesn´t work.
I have a function in my template to generate a custom feed to a flash slideshow which can be access with index.php?feed=sidebar or just sidebar.xml.
Here is the example: http://testosterona.blog.br/sidebar.xml
Do you have any idea how i could make wordpress generate the single item feed with my own template?
Thanks in advanced.